[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-11-07

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-11-07-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad

···

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Anti-censorship
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Next meeting: Thursday, November 14 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: meskio
^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail)

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

This week's Facilitator: onyinyang

== Goal of this meeting ==

Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community.

== Links to Useful documents ==
* Our anti-censorship roadmap:
* Roadmap:Development · Boards · Anti-censorship · GitLab
* The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
* Home · Wiki · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
* Past meeting notes can be found at:
* The tor-project Archives
* Tickets that need reviews: from projects, we are working on:
* All needs review tickets:
* Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
* Project 158 <-- meskio working on it
* Issues · Anti-censorship · GitLab

== Announcements ==

 \* The rest of our Fastly front domains have stopped working over the last few months, and have been replaced
     \* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/151
     \* https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/309#issuecomment-2440083301

== Discussion ==

 \* Is a push notifications distributor for circumvention settings worth pursuing?
     \* some privacy concerns with the connection to the push notification service
     \* benefit: recovery from single point of failure moat domain fronting channel
 \* obfs4 blocked in mobile networks in russia
     \* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40046#note_3125365
     \* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40050
     \* https://ntc.party/t/11010/15
 \* https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/393#issuecomment-2461603654
     \* &quot;All Cloudflare ECH\-enabled services are blocked in Russia\.&quot;
     \* &quot;It is detected by the presence of SNI = \`cloudflare\-ech\.com\` and ECH extension in ClientHello\. Just SNI = \`cloudflare\-ech\.com\` without ECH extension is not affected, as well as ECH grease without SNI = \`cloudflare\-ech\.com\`\.&quot;
     \* https://ntc.party/t/12732

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

== Reading group ==

 \* We will discuss &quot;&quot; on
     \*
     \* Questions to ask and goals to have:
         \* What aspects of the paper are questionable?
         \* Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work?
         \* Are there long\-term actions we can take based on this work?
         \* Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up?

== Updates ==
Name:
This week:
- What you worked on this week.
Next week:
- What you are planning to work on next week.
Help with:
- Something you need help with.

cecylia (cohosh): 2024-11-07
Last week:
- collaborated on the IPtProxy rewrite
- GitHub - tladesignz/IPtProxy at refactor
- updates to the snowflake transport in Lyrebird
- lyrebird!64
- released snowflake-webext v0.9.2
- updated circumvention settings to not use Fastly domains
- Update Circumvention API to remove all nonfunctional fastly domains (#151) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
- update orbot to remove (unused) fastly domain
- Replace nonfunctional fastly front with cdn77 fronts by cohosh · Pull Request #1197 · guardianproject/orbot · GitHub
- helped debug a tor bootstrapping delay with PTs
- Tor process hangs for about 3 minutes when configured with a pluggable transport (#40990) · Issues · The Tor Project / Core / Tor · GitLab
Next week:
- finish snowflake dependency upgrades that were causing problems
- take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices
- make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table
- Simplify BridgeLine struct and make it variable length (!147) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
Needs help with:

dcf: 2024-11-07
Last week:
- made a post comparing relative usage of the snowflake-01 and snowflake-02 bridges Snowflake Daily Operations October 2024 update - #2 by dcf
Next week:
- comment on updates to unreliable snowflake transport Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (!315) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
- open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero Deploy snowflake-server for QueuePacketConn buffer reuse fix (#40260) (#40262) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
- parent: Improve bug discovery process (#40267) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
- open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
Help with:
- tell me when to restart the brokers for Upgrade snowflake broker machine from Debian 10 (#40349) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab

meskio: 2024-11-07
Last week:
- search race conditions in rdsys (rdsys#223)
- fix email hungup problems in rdsys (rdsys#129)
- fix the propagation of gone bridges in rdsys (rdsys#245)
- look at blockade situation in russia (censorship-analysis#40046)
- AFK for IETF/PITG
Next week:
- update snowflake proxy debian package

Shelikhoo: 2024-11-07
Last Week:
- [Next Action Pending] snowflake broker update/reinstall(cont.):

- [Awaiting Review] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (!315) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab ) improvements
- [Awaiting Input] Review CI: fix `latest` container image tag. CI: fix `latest` container image tag. (!408) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
- Prepare State of the Onion script/slide
- Merge request reviews
Next Week/TODO:
- Merge request reviews
- Work on finishing snowflake container release(and fix the comments)
- Vantage point deployment in Iran
- Snowflake broker deployment

onyinyang: 2024-11-07
Last week(s):
- MR for test distributor implementation
- Improve testing branch for Lox distributor/wasm interactions (!271) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
Next week:
- Deploy test distributor
- update lox protocols to return duplicate responses for an already seen request
- add issuer improvements to lox protocols
- Work on outstanding milestone issues:
in particular: Increase the acceptable time for bridgeline failure (#69) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
- key rotation automation

     Later:
     pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096):
         \- add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser
         \- add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:

- improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable
- sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum

 \(long term things were discussed at the meeting\!\):
     \- brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets \(of bridges\) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice
         Question: What makes a bridge usable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we&#39;re getting the most appropriate resources to people?
             1\. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider?
                 e\.g\., by PT, by bandwidth \(lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open\-invitation buckets?\), by locale \(to be matched with a requesting user&#39;s geoip or something?\)
             2\. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges \(and untrusted users have access to 1\)? More? Less?

theodorsm: 2024-10-24
Last weeks:
- Adjusting to post-student life
- Testing out beta releases of pion dtls and webrtc
Next weeks:
- Update Snowflake to use latest pion upstream releases
- Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls
- Condensing thesis into paper
Help with:
- Feedback on thesis

Facilitator Queue:
onyinyang meskio shelikhoo
1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting
2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue

--
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onyinyang

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